Put three people in a room who can’t get on with each other. Condemn
them to stay there for all eternity while they torture each other. Sit
and watch as the gruesome story plays out. And what do you have?
One answer is the 1944 existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos. Another is the story of the neverending Greek debt crisis in which the three main characters are Alexis Tsipras, Wolfgang Schäuble and Christine Lagarde.
The plot is as follows. Greece
has been through a terrible slump. Its economy has shrunk by more than a
quarter, equivalent to the Great Depression in the US. Its financial
position has become so parlous and its credit-rating so poor that it
needs financial help to get by. It is currently on its third bailout.
Up until now the money has been provided by Europe and the
International Monetary Fund and it has come with strings attached. The
money for Athens is disbursed in tranches and can be stopped if Greece
fails to go ahead with promised reforms. Athens is balking at inflicting
further pain on its population, which has led to the threat that no
more assistance will be forthcoming. To complicate matters, the
Europeans and the IMF have fallen out.
Put simply, the Greeks say the conditions on them are too severe.
They want debt relief but are resisting demands at pension reform and
for “hire and fire” labour market reform.
The IMF agrees that Greece’s debt burden is far too high and the
stipulation that the country should run an underlying budget surplus of
3.5% a year is unrealistic. The Fund is warning that the debt could
become “highly explosive” and will not financially back the latest
rescue attempt without meaningful debt relief. But it is also insisting
that Greece sticks to a reform programme that the Fund believes will
improve growth prospects.
(...)

And the article ends this way:

Another key player, Schaeuble.

The Europeans have said they would like Greece to be sorted at the
meeting of finance ministers planned for 20 February. This could still
happen if Tsipras decides that the only alternative to liberalising
redundancy rules and pension reform would be to hold a “who runs
Greece?” election that he would almost certainly lose.
The situation could also be resolved if Germany decided to support
the IMF’s call for much more generous debt relief for Greece, or if
Berlin bowed to pressure from Trump and boosted domestic spending.
But the ingredients are there for the neverending crisis to rumble on
into the summer, when Greece will eventually run out of money and will
not be able to pay its creditors. If there is no swift resolution, bond
yields will rise and talk of Grexit will resurface.Huis Clos is known in English as No Exit. For Greece, if life becomes even more intolerable, there is one way out.

If you want to read the recent view of the IMF on the Greek debt crisis, you will find interesting information in this IMF Press Briefing of February 9, 2017: Transcript IMF Press Briefing.

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org